


Pretty pink past

by Golgolutz



Category: Adventure Time
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Anal Fingering, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Cunnilingus, Existential Angst, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Smut, Mouth Kink, No Plot/Plotless, POV Bubblegum, POV Marceline, Pre-Canon, Semi-Public Sex, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2019-10-26 23:36:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 18,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17755652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Golgolutz/pseuds/Golgolutz
Summary: A series of episodic moments in the Bubbline history, from their first encounter to the point they get back together in canon. Includes my HCs about the universe and the characters, some songs, immortality banter, and orgasms.





	1. When Marceline noticed Bonnibel

**Author's Note:**

> Marceline is one of my favorite characters ever, I hope I did her justice ^;-;^

The cave wall where I hang my jackets has smoothened over time. I try to remember when was it that I drilled the hooks in there; it must have been almost a decade ago, soon after I settled in here. I drag my fingers across the cold rock, then hang my leather jacket.

I throw my boots across the room and levitate my body a couple of centimeters above the ground, because the carpet is damp and I really like these socks. Clothing is so hard to find, and laundry takes a lot of planning, so I’ve learnt to be resourceful with my belongings. 

The moonlight peaks into the cave, making everything look eerie and soft - my bed that I almost never use, the fluffy blankets and pillows, the wardrobe, the posters I poorly drew myself, the string of round, gas lanterns across the ceiling and all the other junk I don’t clean up. The cave is small, but cozy, and with a great bird-eye view over Ooo, with narrow tunnels in the back leading into the mountain, where bats nest. I hang out with them sometimes, but lately I’ve started to miss social interactions again. And I know exactly why.

Down the valley, a human-like settling started being built a few months ago and it keeps developing at an incredible rate. I check it out occasionally, but the inhabitants are made out of candy - another unfortunate, late product of the mushroom effect, I assume. There's lots of shades of red around the village, which severely shortened my hunts, but otherwise they have nothing to offer. No fun jokes, no snarky remarks, no higher intelligence; just a painful reminder of what having meaningful conversations used to be like.

I grab my guitar to get my mind off of it and fly around the place restlessly, tuning it. Oh, how well my fingers recognize the course touch of the strings. It’s a memory more deeply engraved into my brain than flying and music is a friend older than my immortality. I start mindlessly playing parts of different songs, but I have a longing that singing can’t sooth.

I’ve heard the rumours, I’ve seen the clues. There’s infrastructure and engineering behind the village in the valley. There’s a ruler behind them, a clever one. And judging by the huge foundation being built, they want a palace. A monarth, then. Very well, I am one too.

I glide to the entrance of the cave, grazing over the view and the distanced contour of the houses. 

“Hello there, busy bee,” I sing slowly, coming along with the lyrics as I go, “How does it feel to build a kingdom so aimlessly? You claimed these mountains as your own but do you know the walls are crawling... with me. You plan to grow and show ‘em all and- what the fuck is that thing-yyy?”

I got surprised by the sudden movement I see, but I still had to finish the rhyme. I put my guitar down and fly out of the cave, ready to fight if I had to. At the edge of the village, a huge, humanoid creature starts standing up, heavily and clumsily. It has a gigantic, spherical head with a cone on it and skinny limbs. 

That is definitely new. It manages to sit straight, then it wobbles around a bit, stepping carefully. It seems harmless, but I’m intrigued. I put my boots and jacket back on - I’m not sensitive to temperature anymore, not to mention Ooo has been in a constant late-summer state for hundreds of years (except of Simon’s terf), but I keep the ritual of putting clothes on when I leave the house, for my sanity if nothing else. 

I fly along the mountain slope, above the rustling leaves of the trees and the pointy rocks, straight towards the giant. 

I reach him in about half an hour, as the full moon gets out from behind the clouds and I notice the thing is actually a walking gumball, with a face and everything. Dear Glob, has this planet not suffered enough. 

I fly up cautiously to get a closer look at its face.

“Halt!” it notices me, proundly. “Identify yourself!”

“Umm,” I say, sort of just levitating there in front of him, making sure its arms don’t flinch in my direction. “My name if Marceline the vampire Queen.”

Maybe I should have dropped the vampire part, but I love saying it out loud.

“Please state your species and why you approached the Candy Kingdom.”

Chill, it’s just a bunch of houses and 0.5 percent of a palace, surrounded by a river and a half-assed wall.

“Half demon of Nightosphere, half human of Old North America, full vampire,” I state. “And I’m just flying around, I have no bad blood with your kingdom,” I accentuate, amused. 

I wonder if the gumball is their ruler, but it doesn’t comment anything about it. Instead, it squints its eyes at me. 

“Are vampires dangerous?”

“No,” I tell it, with just a brief hesitation.

“Very well, you must excuse me, it’s my first day. You may pass,” it moves aside and encourages me with one arm whooshing through the air.

Well if I’m already here, I might as well snack.


	2. When Bonnibel noticed Marceline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First contact established!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How slow must a burn be to require tagging?

“Look at her,” I whisper to myself, eyes pressed on the binoculars, the soft wind from the open window in front of my desk blowing my hair.

I live with Peppermint Butler until my palace is done, but the house still has a pretty good view over the kingdom. I’ve noticed the intruder as soon as she started levitating down the main road, seemingly with no purpose in mind. A sly human-like entity, with long black hair, red boots and the ability to fly. A vampire? I’ve never seen one (they had been eradicated before I departed from mother), but I did see humans before.

Lately, there have been peculiar cases reported by my Candy people - loss of skin color in their sleep, and some complains of being attacked by a creature. I wouldn’t describe the woman outside as a creature, but she’s my prime suspect right now and I don’t plan to let her go. I follow her through the lenses, but she turns left on Chocolate avenue and gets out of my sight, so I slam the binoculars down on the desk and start looking through my drawers for a weapon.

“Peppermint Butler!” I call, searching through my belonging in a hurry.

I’m still in the process of moving and most of my tech is at the tree house. I manage to find a standart shield capsule, which I fix on my nape and turn on. The shield field is invisible, but it would absorb most of the shock if I were to be attacked. But the only weapon I find is an old chemical gun. If her nervous system is mammal-like, a shot of these needles would put her to sleep.

“Princess?” I hear Butler’s rusty voice, confused at the door of my temporary work place.

I woke him up. It must have gotten late without me realizing again. I will apologize when I’ll have the time.

“Vampires!” I order him shortly, putting my shoes on and taking my lab coat off. “Find out as much as you can about vampires, and other occult stuff!”

“As much… as I can?” he asks, still sleepy.

He’s my most competent creation and knows about the latest attacks, he’ll figure out what the situation is when he wakes up fully. I sprint past him without another word, bursting out of the house.

I run all the way to the street I last saw her, then slow down and walk quietly around the neighborhood, listening, the gun tense in my hands. I am not enough to protect the kingdom, even if I’d have all my inventions on me. I should design some guards as soon as possible, and maybe another Gumball Guardian. I feel helpless, and consider for a moment to leave the Candy people on their own and return to the tree house. But I’ve become responsible for what I’ve tamed. 

The air is still warm, the night clear and the narrow streets silent. The houses in this area are almost completely done, with only caramel isolation missing here and there, but they are already inhabited. My children are sleeping in them, unaware they might become victims.

I breathe carefully, ready to fire at any corner I take. Then I hear it: someone is screaming two streets aways from me. If I don’t stop it soon, the Candy people are going to wake up and panic, not making my job easier. I hurry to the source, checking again how much sleeping needles I have available. 

I take the corner and see the monster.

“Don’t move!” I scream, pointing the gun at its thick neck.

It’s a some sort of huge bat, with a flat face and wings, but it stand on two legs and holds a Strawberry Candy in its dexterous fingers, close to its pointy fangs.

“Put the Candy down!” I demand.

The bat creature lowers the prisoner but doesn’t let go. It turns its head to face me better, looking me straight in the eye. I almost forgot I started by looking for a woman, but I now notice the red boots the beast is wearing, as well as jeans and a tank top, both stretched out to fit the furry body. It’s her.

I figure it’s better to shoot her now, before she flies away or becomes invisible, but she let’s go of the Candy, who runs away immediately on its skinny legs. She turns fully at me, slowly, with her hands raised up. I take a step back, cursing my body language for displaying fear and subordinance. 

“Show your real face!” I tell her, puffing out my chest a little.

The bat lady smiles with her hideous mouth - a cocky smirk, perhaps. Then, still with her hands up and fangs showing, she starts shifting back to her human form. The mane of dark hair grows back down her shoulders, and the tank top becomes loose on her chest. But I have studied humans before, and she’s not quite there. Her skin is so pale it has a blue tint to it, her canines don’t shrink all the way back, her ears stay pointy and flexible, her eyes are yellow and glowing, and when her pupils focalise on me, they narrow into vertical slits.

“You’re a teenager,” is the first thing she says, letting her hands down slowly.

“I’m three hundred eighty two years old,” I inform her, my hands still up and pointing the gun.

This is not counting the decades I spent with mother; I always considered my birthdate as the one I departed. But I have a human resembles myself and I understand why the vampire would consider me young. 

“You look sixteen,” she says.

I technically look fifteen, according to my charts. I approximated my biological aging rate compared to humans, and I should “turn” 16 in two hundred years. But I still don’t have enough data about by physiology, so I might have miscalculated. After all, I matured through puberty at such an alarming rate, that I thought I might be mortal after all. But the past 150 years I stayed virtually the same and the aging process is only going to slow down from now on. Hopefully it’ll stop entirely once I reach adulthood, but I can’t be sure.

The stranger in front of me must also have a very long life-span, if she wasn’t impressed whatsoever when I said I’m over three hundred years old. She looks like a late teen herself.

“Are you a vampire?” I require confirmation.

“Yes, I already told so to the big boy over there,” she points towards the Guardian. 

I had just placed it in function and it already lets vampires roam free on the kingdom premice. 

“What’s that gun loaded with, garlic?” she goes on, with a ear flitch.

I lower my gun. Could her joking be a sign of higher intelligence?

“Candy people don’t have hemoglobin based blood,” I test her. “What are you terrorizing them for?”

“I drink the color red,” she explains. 

This adds up with the victims of decoloration being red and pink Candy, but why the bat form? Did she know being scared brings up the pigmentation in Candy people?

“Why did you transform into a monster?”

“For fun,” she chuckles, but it only makes me squint my eyes at her, judgmentally. “Look, my hunts are usually just drinking the red from fruits and flowers. It gets boring when they don’t try to run away.”

“How did you survive the nuclear winter, then?” I get suspicious. I barely survived it myself and there sure were no fruits or flowers around.

“Hybernated,” she shrugs.

For hundreds of years? Impressive. I want to bring her back to the lab and study her in detail, but I doubt she’d come peacefully. I could gun her down right here and now, but I don’t want to be in bad terms with the only other being on the continent that can make an actual joke. And she is pretty, too. Intimidating, but pretty. I always liked how humans looked, I even shaped myself to resemble them.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed seeing a face that wasn’t a product of my creations, or belonging to some weird mutt. She has a regular human nose and cheekbones, eyelashes, lips, and complexity in every expression she makes, which is delightfully comforting. I will have to forbid her from hunting my Candy people, but I don’t think I’ll banish her altogether.

But I will figure out the vampire legislation later. For now, it’s a pleasant summer night and I’m a teenager who wants a friend.

“Do you have a name?”

She smiles at me widely, and when she answers, it’s with pride and contentment. 

“Marceline the Vampire Queen.”

She gives me her hand to shake, despite having a higher rank than me. Then I remember there’s no vampires left, so it was probably just an empty title. I grab her hand firmly and I love how it feels.

“Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum.”


	3. When they both said it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some time passed, they're now good friends having a spontaneous sleepover. A bit angsty, but mostly sweet. Also, drug mention.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song she's singing is Man of a Thousand Faces by Regina Spektor.

“Common Bonnie, we’ve been hanging out for years!” I insist, levitating above ground, back towards her, waiting for her to jump on.

“It’s been fourteen months,” she corrects me.

Huh. I’m terrible at keeping track of time, but she has all these calendars and daily logs. I turn around and land down.

“And they’ve been the best months in a long, long time,” I put a hand on her shoulder.

“But you live so high up, and I have no shield on,” she looks towards my cave, up the rocky top of the mountain. “Are you sure there’s no other way there?”

I’ve been visiting her as often as possible without looking desperate, ever since we’ve first met. It started as a deal: she gave me red pigments she produced in her lap, I helped her with the construction of the palace. But every time I went down to the Candy Kingdom, I would stay a little longer than necessary and we’d wonder through the catacombs and forests around, getting to know each other. With every story she shared, I wanted to know more about her, fascinated by her origin, impressed by her hopes for the future and touched by the vulnerability she’d so rarely and subtly show.

Being afraid to fly too high is one of them. I’ve been carrying her around here and there, but always at safe distance from ground.

“I’ll hold you tight all the way there,” I promise.

If we’d be around Candy people, she’s never need reassurance - for them she is this fearless, omnipotent leader and she needs to keep the illusion. But here, as the sun is almost completely set, between trees and in civilian clothes, she hesitates. I wonder if there was something else on her mind than the fear of falling.

“You don’t… trust me?” I ask.

I’ve come to feel so comfortable around her, it never occured to me that she might not feel the same.

“I just don’t like not being in control,” she admits, pink eyelashes flustering as she looks away.

“But you are in control,” I say. “You chose to hang out with me and it will be you to choose when you’ll be ready to visit my cave.”

I grab her hands and she holds mine back. I really enjoy the touch of her body, soft and moldable to some extent, but not sticky as I’d first imagined. She looks back in my eyes, considering my point of view for a moment, then gives me a smile.

“Alright, turn around,” she decides, grabbing my shoulder and rotating me.

“Are you sure?” I ask, as I let her jump on my back and grab her legs.

“Yes, you’re right,” she states, her insecurity not sensible in her voice anymore. “Friends visit each other and you always come to my palace.”

The fact that she calls me a friend makes makes my heart race and my knees melt, but I should probably not tell her that, since we’re about to take off and I’d just put on a big show about how capable I am.

I jump up and start flying towards my cave - a path I’ve taken many times, but now it’s very special and I’m actively focusing on flying right and not missing the entrance. The lila sky starts taking on night notes, while still pink on the horizon. I’ve come to like this color.

I land smoothly on the carpet in my “room” and let Bonnie unclench her arms from around my neck. I cleaned up before inviting her, but I still see a pair of underwear on the floor with the corner of my eye. I light on all the lanterns and invite her to take place, subtly shoving my boxers under the bed in the meanwhile.

I light up the fire outside and put some water to boil in my caldron. I mostly use it when I wash myself, but it’s nice to have someone to offer tea to. When I get back in, Bonnie is looking around politely, humming.

“Do you have a reflection?” she asks me, picking up my mirror.

“Nope, I keep it around for cocaine and stuff.”

I fly to the wardrope and search for a hoodie to give her, cause it’s chilly in the cave and I’ve seen her massaging her arms. But when I throw it to her, I notice her shocked look.

“You do drugs?” she scolds me, dressing it on.

“And sex and rock and roll,” I smirk, but she’s not impressed. “They barely have any effect on me.”

Compared to the stuff you can find in the Nightosphere, at least. But when Bonnie sits down on the bed, she still has that look on her face. I put on some music on the cassetophone and plunge on my belly next to her, making the bed bounce.

“Look, I’m a teenager,” I explain. “I taught myself guitar, hunted vampires for a while, then had a few fights with my dad, drugs were the natural next step. Plus, you’re a chemist, don’t you use them all the time?”

“Yeah, on subjects. Maybe you’ve noticed, but I don’t like taking risks. I’m not as resilient as you are. I’m not even sure I’m immortal.”

“You know, back when humans were a thing, they’d write stories about immortality and always present it as a tragic destiny to be cursed with.”

“Dumbasses,” she chuckles. “There is so much to explore and learn, I’ll never get tired of it.”

She’s 176 years younger than me, but used her time to become a genius in all fields possible and build a civilisation, while I took a three hundred year nap and cultivated psychedelic plants. I feel a little stupid right now, but I don’t let this ruin my good mood. Precisely what a stupid fella would do.

The water outside is boiling, so I hurry to put out the fire and dump some wild berries in to infuse the tea, covering the cauldron with a metal plate (which I’m pretty sure used to be a car door). I return in a few minutes with two teas. I leave Bonnie’s to cool down, as I know she can’t consume things that are too hot, but I sink my fangs in mine and slurp all the red the berries had to offer.

Bonnie looks at me with an almost creepy fascination - I’m glad I’m her pal and not her test subject; I’ve seen what she does to her Candy rats.

“So you can also drink it, if you wanted to?” she makes sure.

I take a sip from the tea to prove it. “I can eat and drink, I just don’t absorb any nutrients and then I have to waste time going to the toilet. Same as breathing, I do it most of the time, but just because my brain can’t shake off the habit.”

I also only sleep to kill time, but lately I’ve been enjoying staying awake. We sip our teas and chat until the cassette is over and the moon is up. It’s getting late, but she doesn’t say anything about going home and I don’t either.

At some point, she wants to try on my guitar and I reluctantly let her - after all, she allowed me to carry her on my back all the way here. I teach her some basics in exchange for future calculus lessons, and she’s pretty good at it. I have to put my arms around her and I like her smell - I hope it will rub off on my hoodie. The strings cut into her fingers and the marks stay much longer than on normal flesh, but it doesn’t hurt her.

“Alright, I should take a break before I cut off the tips of my fingers,” she laughs, handing me over the guitar. “What songs do you know, that you haven’t showed me yet?”

I strip the guitar around me and levitate in front of the bed, ready to faze her with my music.

“Hey, can I sleep here?” she fazes me instead, so I hurry to approve, with one too many yeah-s.

She yawns and takes off her pants, remaining in underwear and socks, then jumps underneath the fluffy blanket. My pupils go full round and I can’t blame the dim lighting for it.

“Great, then sing something soothing,” she requests with a sleepy voice, making herself comfortable against the pillows.

I forgot all the songs I’ve ever heard in my life, so I need a second to pick something up.

“Ok, this one is from Regina Spektor, it came out a year before the mushroom explosion.” I start pinching the strings slowly and close my eyes humming, trying to remember it. “The man of a thousand faces,” I start, my voice raspy, “Sits down at the table, Eats a small lump of sugar, And smiles at the moon like he knows her.”

I open my eyes and she’s looking at me with care and admiration, and I feel, for the first time in ages, like crying. My voice gets shaky, but I move on with the singing, letting myself go with the moment, be it overwhelming.

“...Good is better than perfect, Scrub till your fingers are bleeding,” I wail, “And I'm crying for things that I tell others to do without crying.”

At this point I’m actually really crying, and Bonnie pirks up concerned, but I close my eyes and go on, leaning back in the air. She lets me finish the song completely. In the deep silence that follows, I keep my eyes close shut and sigh softly, cheeks wet.

I feel her hands grabbing mine and pulling me down. She takes the guitar away gently and puts her arms around me instead of it. I hug back as strong as I can and we stay still in the moonlight until I calm down and my shoulders stop jerking. There’s a million things going through my head.

“I don’t want to lose you,” is the thought I settle on, face deep between her neck and shoulder.

“Why would you think you will?” she whispers, caressing by back.

“I don’t know, maybe you’ll get fucked up by a magic crown, or overthrown by your people, or squished to the ground by a huge monster.”

I open my eyes to wipe them and look at her face, close to mine.

“I just… feel like I’m marinating in these feeling of emptiness and inadequacy, and now and then something meaningful happens, and I love you - it -, but it scares me.”

“I love you too,” Bonnie says. “It, I mean,” she also corrects herself, obviously on purpose. “And I know what you mean. You get accustomed to loneliness and nihilism, so when you catch yourself feeling anything else it takes you by surprise. But I’m glad I get to share these moments with you. I think we should choose to cherish them.”

I crack up a smile. We break apart from hug, but our hands still hold each other.

“It’s probably pointless to say this now, but I also consider you my friend,” I tell her.

“Hey, when everything is pointless, nothing is pointless,” she shrugs and I start laughing, wiping my snot across my arm, to her disgust.

She breaks apart with an eww, but it only makes me laugh harder.

“I mean it, you’re my best friend,” I say, flying over to the water bucket to clean myself.

“You don’t really have many options,” she teases.

She seems cold, legs close together and arms around her, so I fly almost full speed and I tackle her back into the bed.

“I have plenty of friends in the Nythosphere,” I let her know, when we’re done laughing. “Granted, they’re all garbage and litteral demons, but still.”

We throw the blanket over us, holding it above our heads, and cuddle up silently, watching the lanterns above through the material.

“Do you want to talk about that magic crown that steals friends away?” she asks, quietly.

Oh, of course she pieced it together.

“Let’s just go to sleep for now,” I suggest. “I’ll tell you about it at the next sleepover.”

She’s very tired and doesn’t object, but her hand hold tightens up in solidarity for a second.

“Are you also going to sleep?” she asks, as I stand up on the bed to put the lanterns off.

“I can’t imagine a better way to spend the night,” I say, blowing the last flame away, then sliding back in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think Marcy is stupid ok, she doesn't think that either, she was just being fun and laid back.


	4. When missing a friend became longing for a lover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I accidentally plot-ed a little? Marcy is stuck in the Nightosphere, and Bonnie rescues her, while also figuring out she's in love. Here's the song she's singing in this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sncDtok7LRE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll get to the erotic part soon, I'm making this up as I go. Hey btw, English is not my native language, so let me know if I make mistakes (which I probably do a lot, cause I'm only proofreading twice). Also let me know if you want to beta read for the next chapters :)

“Put the building of the particle accelerator on hold, since it would bring too little practical use for how expensive it is,” I speak into the mic, for the science weekly log. “With the extra metal resources, build more windmills on the Breakfast domain, facilitate relations with the Breakfast Princess.”

All these new princesses have started multiplying like insects over the last years, imitating my political system and calling themselves aristocrats, while I provide resources and energy to their land. I drag a copy of the last line recorded to the Political To Do folder.

“Monitor Breakfast People creation rate and keep population under control,” I add, rubbing my forehead.

With the corner of my eye, I notice the Personal Feelings And Sheesh folder and my stomach knots up. I haven’t updated those logs in a long time, because I’m afraid of what I’ll come to realize if I start opening up in a coherent manner. And yet, it has been five years since I last saw Marcy and her absence is taking a toll on me.

“I’m worried for Marceline,” I start the log, decided to make it short and practical. “She still hasn’t returned from the Nightosphere.”

She left to help her father with something that was supposed to take a couple of months and she hasn’t returned yet. She hated that place, so I can’t imagine what could keep her up.

“If she decided to stay there, surely she’d have let me know. What if she returned without telling me?” I voice my fear, then cough to get my voice back to normal. “But I’ve checked her cave and it’s abandoned.”

I had to convince a Rainicorn to take me up there, but she was very nice and understanding about it.

“So there are two possibilities left,” I go on, trying keep my reasoning clear. “She either came back in Ooo but to a different house and is avoiding me, or she can not leave the Nightosphere.”  
I pause the recording and rub my tears away before they get to escape my eyes.

“I need to see her,” I cry softly into the microphone. “And I don’t know which option is crazier, to roam the continents in search of her, or to find a way to get into the Nightosphere and drag her out with my own two hands.”

I stop the log there, but my mind is set. 

The very next morning, I order Peppermint Butler to learn how to open an one-way portal to the Nightosphere. As for myself, I find time over the next months to work on a vampiro-radar with a radius big enough to cover the planet. It scans for the disturbance in the Higgs field that Marceline creates when she flies, and I stick the radar on top of my communication tower. If that bitch is on this excuse of a planet, I’ll find her.

***

“I didn’t find her,” I tell the log, more than two years later. “Tomorrow, I go to hell.”

I close off my computer and try to get some sleep. Peppermint Butler is a portal pro now, and my portal remote-control worked perfectly the last time I tested it, but I’m still nervous. To make sure no extra demons pass to this world, I’ll keep the portal operating only one way - here to there - and then reverse the flow in the moment of passing back. 

I’m down in the basement before the sun rises. Butler is already there, sipping his espresso. 

“Ready to risk your life for the spawn of the devil?” he asks me, with a pinch of sass.

“I prepared a robot clone to replace me if I’m gone for too long,” I let him know as I gear up.

I’ve tested the conditions in the Nightosphere and they’re habitable, but I’m still putting on an oxygen mask, my strongest shield, a shot gun, a spray of holy water treated with salt and silver, a portable depressurizer and temperature adjuster, a mini vampiro-radar, and sun cream.

“Butler,” I say solemnly, putting a hand on his shoulder, as his eyes look up at mine with emotion. “Make sure people don’t ask my clone too complicated questions, she runs on updated toaster software.”

Butler shakes my hand away and starts opening the portal. I make sure the remote control batteries are full and tighten my pony tail.

When the portal is up and running, I jump in.

I appear on the other side in an instant. I’m in a remote, empty cave close to a demonic settling, where the vampiro-radar detected the strongest Higgs disturbance. I turn the radar on, but the signal is bad because of all the other flying creatures in here, so I adjust the signal threshold. This reduces the detection radius; I’ll have to walk around searching for her.

I get out of the cave cautiously and walk down the steep cliff towards the buildings I see in the valley, surrounding a big dome. The entire place looks like a cave, except the walls are iridescent and move in waves, like the bowels of a huge monster. I reach the town and encounter a couple of demons and other oddities on the way, but they ignore me - not sure if it’s because of the holy water or because gum people look Nightosphere-y enough.

To my surprise, my sight finds Marceline before my radar. More precisely, I see posters of her, all over the town. Marceline the Human Civilian is playing at the Lucifer arena tonight. In the poster, she poses in front of the dome building, mascara heavy around her yellow eyes, and her tongue out. She seems to be having a good time and this makes me furious. I can’t believe she’s giving concerts while I’m here alone and worried sick.

“Excuse me,” I ask a big, walking set of teeth. “What time is it until Marceline’s concert starts?”

“We’re already late for it, m’am,” he says. “Curse you for having eyes!” he adds politelys, but I’m already running towards the dome in the distance.

As I get closer, I bump into more and more creatures heading in the same direction, and by the time I reach the entrance, it’s impossible to pass through by the thick layer of fans.

I’m restless and feel like shooting everyone in front of me, but I use the time I have to wait in line to try and sort out my feelings. I’m nervous and excited to see her, but mad and frustrated that she didn’t invite me to her stupid concert, or at least tell me she wanted to stay in the Nightosphere. And I’m also pissed at all these “fans” that don’t even know her. Before she left, we’ve been best friends for years - how dare these demons crowd up at her feet after only seeing her in posters? 

She performed for me first and wrote me into her songs. She told me her jokes, stories and nightmares, I know them all. I know how sharp her nails are, how soft her elf years, how ticklish her eyelashes against my cheeks and how deep her voice is first thing in the morning. I understood her past struggles, and I helped her through current ones! I cooked her shades of red, and listened to her thoughts, and shaved her undercuts and-

Oh my Glob.

I am in love with her.

The realization hits me so hard I gasp out loud and freeze still in the slow crowd, clenching my chest. I was never in love before, but I know the symptoms. I dreamed of her embraces too dearly and I missed her kisses too painfully for this to be platonic. Remembering her voice makes me smile like an idiot, thinking of her lips makes me fuzzy, imagining her hands on my waist makes me want to turn around and grab hers and pull her close to me. I want to dive into her soul and it’s aching me that she might not want the same. 

“Ticket?”

“WHAT?” I shriek into the face of the fly-man at the front door, waking up from my revelations with no memory on how I got all the way there.

“Ticket,” he buzzes.

“I’m Marceline’s girlfriend,” I stare him dead in the eyes and just saying this makes me ecstatic, confirming my beliefs.

How have I not realized earlier? Why did it take a seven year absence for me to piece it together?

“Aren’t we all,” the fly-man is not impressed.

I don’t have time for this. I take my holy water out and spray his eyes, then run right past him and his fuming face, with a dozen other monsters and demons taking advantage and following me indoors.

I walk through the crowd as fast as I can, eyeing the stage at the end of the arena. The lights are blinding me, but I can’t take my eyes away in the hope I’ll see her shadow contouring on the lit, fake smoke. She must be about to get on stage - I can hear her bass reverberating through the entire place, making my heart race and the earth beneath me pulsate with every chord.

When her first song starts and she gets out from behind the curtain, the public goes crazy and I have to jump around, trying to see properly above their heads. 

“My demons,” she starts singing straight away, with her raspy, cocky voice, “Are begging me to open up my mouth.”

She’s wearing skinny ripped black jeans and a loose top, cut deep enough for her bra to be visible from any angle. There is anger behind her passionate singing and her arm and back muscles are clearly defined in the lighting, tensing on each verse, holding onto the mic as if she wants to smash it.

“I sold my soul to a three-piece,” she growls singing, her hair flowing on her shoulders at each jerk of her head, as if alive.

She sticks her split tongue out and it reaches her clavicles. I try to not be too hypnotized by the sight and advance in the crowd, approaching the stage with every step. It’s good that my body can sustain a lot of pressure, because all these trolls and whatnot are squishing me from all sides. But I can now get a good view of her.

“But it’s the devil that’s tryna hold me down,” she reaches the chorus and let’s herself fall on her knees, legs apart and chest back, mic so close to her mouth her fangs are grazing it.

I do not remember the exact moment I figured I was a girl and decided to form my anatomy accordingly, but now I’ll always have this moment to pinpoint as the one I knew I was gay. I want to see her drop again.

But she stops singing abruptly, while the background music goes on. She drops the mic, face paralyzed with shock. The crowd is confused and starts turning around to figure what it was she saw that unsettled her to that extend. The music also stops, but she keeps staring at me, in the sharp pitch that’s left of the song’s echo. I look straight back into her eyes, but our silent exchange of looks and recognition is short.

The next second, she sprints into the air and charges at me, flying above the crowd, straight like a falling predatory bird. She descends in a heartbeat and takes my breath away from how hard she hits my chest when grabbing me. Another heartbeat and we’re above ground, flying full speed towards the exit of the arena, as the monsters around also start flying or crawling on the curved wall, boo-ing and spitting fire and acid.

“What are you doing here, we’re never gonna make it out alive!” she shouts, face half transformed into her bat shift.

She dodges all the doors and maneuvers perfectly along the main hallway, but the havoc behind us follows. A couple of winged demons are aggressively getting closer to us, so I take my shot gun out and shoot blindly in their direction.

“Why did you not tell me you want to stay here?”

I realize how very much not the moment it is, but I can’t help it. Marceline reaches the main entrance and strikes through the body guards like bowling pins, though I’m pretty sure me shooting at them also helped.

“Want?!” she stutters, soaring up in the air as soon as we get outside. “I don’t want to stay here, I cannot leave, I can’t open portals anymore!”

Out of the dome, monsters are spewing out like puss, and they all seem angry their rockstar is fleeting away. I get out out bullets and throughout the gun at the nearest hooved dragonfly creature.

“I opened a portal, can you pass through?” I ask her, reaching for the holy water spray.

“No way you can open a portal,” Marcy screams, turning at a following demon and hissing at him as scary as she could. 

“I already have!” I get pissed, spraying the demon. “How do you think I got here?”

“Shut up, I’m stressed! Where’s the portal?”

“There, in that narrow cave,” I point and she turns sharply.

“You opened a portal in Vanessa’s toilet?”

“Who’s Vanessa?”

“AAAAAAH,” she just screams, charging at the entrance of the cave.

I take my remote control out and prepare to switch it from “Ooo→N.” to “N.→Ooo”. 

“Slow down,” I let her know, worried we’ll fling ourselves at full speed in the ceiling of my basement.

We pass through and she barely manages to decelerate. We do hit the ceiling, but I manage to switch the flow of the portal in time and no demon squeezes through after us.

We fall on the ground in the safety of my palace and I hear Peppermint Butler starting the chanting to close the portal, screaming latin words as his eyes roll backwards into his head. My entire body hurts - I can only imagine what damage Marcy took, whose bones are more breakable than mine, be she vampire or not.

“Are you ok?” I rush to help her off the ground, as the portal near us shrinks, blowing wind and lightning the entire room like a night-club.

She sit up and grabs by arms, face fully human now. 

“What the fuck was that?!” she asks, still screaming.

“Who’s Vanessa and why is her toilet so clean?” I scream back, overwrought myself.

“She’s a medusa-spider and she only poops souls,” Marcy explains, starting laughing nervously. 

Well of course, this fucking adds up. I start laughing too, then I stand up on my knees and bring her head to my chest, hugging her.

“How did you do all of this?” she asks, still processing all the information.

“I’m a stubborn genius, that’s how.”

The portal closes completely and Butler turns the lights on and starts casually wiping away the pentagram. We stay on the ground a little longer, catching our breaths.

“What were you doing down there?” I ask her, pulling away to see her face.

“Oh, Bonnie!” she exclaims. “I went to help my dad run his business because he needed a public relations agent, and let me tell you, both the public and the relations are wack in the Nightosphere, but I agreed cause I was dumb and missed him, but he tricked me, Bonnie, he cursed me to not be able to open portals anymore and no one else there can open them, because demons were banished from Earth, the only reason I could open them until now was because of my human half.” She takes a break to breath in. “I tried to get out for so long, but it was a lost cause, you were the only person outside that knew where I was and I hoped so hard you’d come save me, but then I low-key gave up and became a rock star instead.”

She lets her head fall on my shoulder when she’s done and I awkwardly pat her back.

“I’ll restore your portal opening ability, there’s no curse science can’t beat,” I reassure her, but this doesn’t seem to be what she want to hear.

“I never wanna go back in there!” she snaps, fast and high-pitched, voice muffled by my clothes.

I’m burning through all the adrenaline and become aware of the sleep lost over the years, now piling up and begging me to crash. Marcy lifts her face, leaving half her makeup on me, and by the look of it, she is also exhausted. I want to ask her more questions, but I decide to give her some peace and quiet for a while.

“I can never thank you enough,” she whispers. “Peppermint Butler,” she turns honorably at him. “I shall never drink the red from your stripes and all of your descendants will be safe around me.”

“I’ll see if I can come with a better deal,” he shrugs, then continues swiping the dust.

“And PB…”

“Yes,” both me and Butler turn around. 

“I… I really missed the hell out of you, girl,” she smiles tightly at me, eyeing me in an almost shy way. It’s hard to believe how dominating she was on stage, just a moment ago. 

“Me too,” I say, rubbing some dirt from her cheek. “How about we go take a long bath in the palace bathhouse, to rub the Nighto-stench off, and then we take nap? I kept your blanket dry and puffy, if you want us to take you to your cave instead of sleeping here.”

She smiles at me and tears up, smudging her makeup and dirt further across her face.

“This actually sounds ideal,” she admits relieved and lets me help her stand up. “Wait a second, who’s us? Since when can you fly?”

“I have a connection in the Rainicorn dimension, we have a lot to catch up. But for now, I just want to pass out for a day or two,” I also admit.

“Don’t you have princess errands to run?”

I wave it off uninterestedly.

“I’ll let toaster-me deal with them.”

She looks confused, but she lets it go and grabs my hand instead, sending shivers all the way to my feet, as we walk slowly down the empty hallway towards the pink bathhouse. Sooner or later, I will have to tell her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A medusa-spider is a huge spider with snakes instead of hair, sweet dreams!


	5. Pink Champagne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mmm they skinny deep at twilight and get touchy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The theme of pools and water in romantic/sexual connotations is all over my writing

The lighting in this place is amazing, especially during the golden hour. The royal bath house has tall, clear windows facing the fully bloomed cherry and apple plantations behind the palace, but I manage to see just a fraction of the view outside.

It has a surreal softness to it, which transpasses into the room through the long light patterns extending from the windows, reflected in dozens of sparkles, either flickering with the water in the pools or steady on the mosaic patterns on the walls. The tiles are pastel pink, the water various shades of blue and, close to the ceiling, you can catch glimpses of dust swirling and gleaming peacefully in the light. 

Myself, I can’t swirl in the light, not yet. I have to wait for the sun to set and instead admire the view from a safe spot: a round jacuzzi, separated by the main pool and partially shaded by walls. The water is steamy, and the bubbles don’t run.

“Marcy?” Bonnie calls.

“Yeah, I’m hiding! Why did you have to build the bathhouse facing west?

I hear her bare footsteps approaching and I get closer to the end of the wall to see her. She’s carrying a tray with a bottle of what looks like alcohol and two tall glasses. Her hair is down and she has a fuzzy, white towel wrapped around her in a secure, fashionable way, but her shoulders don’t show any signs of a bathing suit. I wish she wouldn’t bother to cover herself at all. 

“I didn’t know I’d have a vampire friend who likes to swim in the evenings,” she says, putting the tray down, at the edge of the main pool. “The light is not as warm as it looks, maybe it won’t burn you.”

She stands up, her toes curled into the water, and she admires the puffy fields of flowery trees outside, arms apart as if to absorb the last warmth the sunset had to offer, her shadow long behind her. I stick a finger on the other side of the wall, then take it back immediately with a yelp. Definitely burns.

“What took you so long to get here, anyway?” I ask from my beloved shadows.

“I was out of anti-melting spray and had to go back for more.”

Bonnie doesn’t do well in warm water for too long, she gets painful rashes and her outer layer of skin melts and falls off; it’s both rad and very gross. But she likes swimming, so she invented the spray for protection. 

“I brought a bottle of champagne.” She points. 

I let my face sink into the water, only eyes out, following her like a crocodile. She lets her towel drop, then walks down the curved stair into the pool, barely making any waves, but she still gets in the water faster than I’d wish. I get to see her nude once in a blue moon, and then she has to hurry. The last time we swam naked here was after the whole Nightosphere ordeal, more than a year ago. 

Since then, she’s been acting stranger than I’d remembered, more flustered and reserved. I take all her staring and then turning away blushing as a good sign. I’ve been blushing quite a lot myself, thinking of her. I don’t want to be pushy though - I’m very content with our current status, until she figures out whatever is in her head. I bet she’s worried about “ruining the friendship”, which is understandable. Still, I wish she’d get naked with me more.

“What’s the occasion?” I wonder, bored of watching her swim her laps, sending sparks of water drops with every kick.

“What?” she asks, stopping in the middle of the pool, making the waves fall silent.

“What’s the occasion for the champagne? Did you secure a good deal with some province?”

She pouts.

“No, it’s our 12th anniversary since we first met.” She takes her goggles off. “Once it’s dark, we can celebrate. It’s only a stripe of sun left.”

“Don’t people usually celebrate their 10th anniversary?” I chuckle, testing the burn levels with my finger again. It’s bearable, but I’ll wait one more minute.

“You were in the Nightosphere during the tenth one,” she murmurs. “Besides, twelve is a cooler number, it has more divisors,” she adds loudly, but I don’t listen anymore.

I dive underwater and start swimming towards her at the bottom of the pool, where the remaining sunrays can’t reach me. One of the vampire things I’m grateful for is that I can stay underwater for as long as wish. So I take my time swimming around, enjoying the deafening pressure and eerie lighting from the iridescent stones drawing the mosaic on the bottom.

Bonnie swims to the side and sits on the underwater bench, resting her elbows on the edge, and I try to not stare at her curves, foggy and bending in the waves. I swim towards her, sneakily like a shark. I even play the Jaws theme song in my head.

“RAWR!” I emerge with a splash in front of her, with my monster face and my hands up.

“Marcy!” she scolds, splashing me.

The surface of the water kept some of its smooth shine in the dim twilight light, but the fields outside don’t look like an oil painting anymore. Bonnie’s skin is also glimmering, the google marks still circling her eyes, her hair around her in the water. It doesn’t act like mine though, which floats like a black smoke. Hers is more compact, moving in chunks. It reminds me of kinetic sand - it can be parted in hair strings if you run your hand through it, but it melds back together. I love playing with it.

“Marceline,” she says, getting my attention from messing with her hair.

I raise my eyes to see her holding two glasses of champagne, reflecting the pale blue lighting coming from the bottom of the pool. The moon gets out behind me, further illuminating her face and the bubbles in the glasses.

“You have to cut your hair, I haven’t even felt you turning to pour it,” I tease, aware my own hair was getting longer than my thighs. I take my glass and examine its color in the night light.

“It’s pink,” she assures me.

“Well then, here’s to us,” I raise it, but she leaves me hanging.

“To love,” she says, quietly.

“To love!” I agree and raise it again, thirsty for that sparkling pink.

“No. Marcy,” she tries to get my attention and I look back into her eyes. She’s blushing as far as I can tell, but this time she doesn’t look away. “To our love,” she tries to explain.

I feel my heart in the tip of my ears. Damn you, human soft muscle, whose beating is so deeply engraved in my reflexes I can’t stop even after joining the vampires. I swallow, dryly. Maybe I don’t understand this right, maybe she means it in a platonic way.

“To our love,” I agree, brushing it off.

Bonnie has a frustrated look on her face, like the times she’s solving differential equations, but she doesn’t insist and clinks her glass on mine, then bends her head backwards and drinks it all in a go, faster than it takes me to suck the red hue out of mine. She turns to the bottle and pours herself another one.

"Are you alright?” I ask, one eyebrow up.

“Yes, I just really like it. Shut up and play with my hair some more.”

I take a seat next to her and put my glass down, waiting for the drink to unwind her a little. Until then, I don’t mind doing as I’m told. I drag my left hand through her hair, watching the round moon in front of us, absently. My ears are still hot and I can’t take her words out of my mind. Damn right, our love - but show me.

And she does.

She’s staring down the moon as intensely as I am, but her right hand is on my naked thigh. She brushes the tip of her fingers along my muscles, sometimes just an idea towards the inner side, sometimes wandering up to my hip. She touches my pelvic bone and it paralyzes my entire leg with goosebumps.

I keep my eyes on the huge windows, afraid I’ll wake her up to reality if I so much as blink. Instead, I let my hand brush parts of her that lie behind the curtain of hair: her hip, her shoulder, her arm, whatever happens to be in the way. I feel the soft texture of her breast, and pull my hand away as soon as I realize what it is, but she pushes herself into me.

She twists her body around over mine.

And just like that, now she’s sitting on my lap, both legs on the side, hands on my shoulders and stealing the moon away with her silhouette. I raise my eyes to her, unsure what to do with my hands and way too aware of her buttcheeks against my lap and her breast in front of my face, barely covered by wet hair.

The shape of her head is a dark contour against the night sky behind her, but I can still see her face. She’s so nervous, but so decided.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” she asks me and I choke with my own saliva when I answer I don’t.

The water overflows in gentle waves in the drains behind me and the sound of it is hypnotic in the overall echoing silence, but my ears are fully turned towards Bonnie’s breathing. I forget about mine entirely.

Her hands slowly glide up my shoulders, cupping my neck and face. I feel my pulse underneath her pinky, while her middle fingers press at the end on my jawline. I open up my mouth just a bit, but my mind is out of words. All those years acting suave and playing the confident bad girl, silenced by the pressure of a finger resting in the deep spot beneath my ear.

“Bonnie,” I manage to whisper, but one of her thumbs slides against my cheek towards my mouth and my lips freeze again. She brushes her thumb against the corner of my mouth, feels up my cupid bow, then falls on my lower lip. 

I place my hands around her waist, barely touching it. Her hands slide lower on my neck, but my chin stays up and my eyes don’t blink away from hers. She slowly leans in closer, and with my pupils fully dilated, I can see her wet eyelashes sticking together. I get closer myself, watching her lips twitch just ever so slightly, as they’re about to land their kiss.

I close my eyes just in time to get lost in the moment. My world is swayed. Her lips against mine make me feel as ecstatic as I always imagined, and my mouth greets them back with far more courage than it spoke with. 

She parts away for a second, and during the brief exchange of looks before we both close our eyes back, she throws one of her legs on the other side of my lap, then leans in for more. I grab her waist properly, pulling her torso closer to mine, sinking my fingers into her skin. Like a tensed spring set free, I don’t hold back.

I kiss her with all the passion and desire that’s been cooking inside of me, my tongue territorial and fingers eager to explore. My hands move lower on her sides, searching for her love handles and asscheeks. 

She lifts part of her weight on her knees, giving me more space to hold her butt, then pushes her chest into me. I have to lean my head almost all the way back to be able to continue kissing her, now that she stands taller. Her breasts touch my shoulders, bouncing against my neck as she moves her body in waves, kissing me more passionately with each one. 

I take one of my hands from her ass and grab her boob, feeling up her hard nipple, still not believing it was hiding behind a towel not long ago. The softness of her breast in my hand doesn’t compare to anything I’ve ever felt before and I have to refrain from pressing too hard.

She manages to fit a hand between us and touch my breast as well, but she is less assertive, driven more by curiosity than lust. My boobs are not as big and round as hers, so I curve my back and push my chest forward to make up for it. 

We continue making out into the night, until the bath house is filled with our moans, but despite being both naked, we stop there. When she breaks apart for the last time and falls back on my lap breathing loudly, I notice the moon has shifted and I can clearly see us both.

I give Bonnie a smirk, my hands still on her hips.

“Glad you finally picked up on all the gay songs I’ve been playing,” I grin and she starts laughing, covering her face with her hands and leaning back. Her voice sounds surreal, as if my ears can’t associate it with what just happened.

“How long even is your tongue, anyway?” she manages to ask when she gets out from behind her hands.

“I’ve been varying lengths for the entire kissing session, why?” I dare.

“For science, of course,” she giggles, rolling of off me and splashing back on her side, to my left.

“Do you want another glass of champagne?” she asks.

“How about we take it slow?”

I’m pretty damn horny right now, but I don’t want her to do anything while tipsy. We’ll have time for drunk sex, but not the first time. Judging by all her laughing, she’s already nervous enough. Not that my heartbeat is any slower.

She pushes the tray away and leans back against the edge of the pool. “Can we at least toast for my love for you?”

“Hmm, your romantic and sexual love, I take it?” I make fun of her and she punches me playfully.

“Look at all those stars, man,” she says, sliding lower in the water, her neck resting against the edge.

I sink to her level and let my shoulder lean against hers.

“The feelings are reciprocated,” I let her know. 

“You also like the stars?”

“Oh yeah, big time. I have for a while now.” I roll my eyes towards her, but I can’t see her from this angle. “And just to avoid any miscommunication, I mean you. I like you. I like-like you. I love you.”

“I got it, I’m not that dense,” she cuts me, nudging me with her shoulder. “But we’re still friends, right? I mean, even if we kiss.”

“Well do you want to keep kissing in the future?”

“I want to do every possible thing with you, in the future.”

“Then it looks like we just upgraded to girlfriends. Does this make me a princess, or you a queen? Or we’re both queencesses?”

“Shut up and play with my hair.” She nudges me again, lovingly.


	6. Sweet taste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And then they got touchy-er

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a drawing I made, the beginning scene is based on it: http://redotter.tumblr.com/image/182809019317
> 
> Sorry it took me a bit to update, I was busy with an exam (which I failed anyway)! Also, sorry if there are any typos, I'll correct them if I find them later :)

Lady Rainicorn lands in the plantation behind the palace, curling her body in the narrow spot between the lines of apple trees. I jump down as soon as it becomes safe, and land poorly in the grass, but I ignore the jolt in my ankles. I take another quick look at the stars above, looking for the flying shadow of Marceline’s silhouette, but the sky is clear beyond the tree crowns.

“Thank you Lady, have a good night!” I wish her with a short bow.

She narrows her eyes at me, but doesn’t comment anything about my impatience. I’ve been scanning the ground and skies for Marcy as soon as we entered Candy Kingdom territory and Lady Rainicorn noticed. She wishes me an “enjoyable” night and takes off.

I’ve at a seminar hosted by the Turtle Princess for the past week, and planned to meet Marcy at the palace tonight, after dark. But the flight was long and the night has set for a while - she must be already waiting for me. I pace towards the back entry of the palace, the last shreds of my pride keeping me from bursting into a run. I missed her like crazy and I can’t wait to have my body squished in her arms.   
She sent me some very provocative messages while I was gone and I used my time at the Library to brush up on my human lesbian sex knowledge. Needless to say, I didn’t pay much attention to any of the talks and meetings.

I pass by the Banana Guards barely noticing them, and walk up the long, lateral flight of stairs leading straight to the third floor, but I only take a few steps when I have to stop in surprise.   
There is someone on the stairs.

The lights of the rooms along this side of the palace are mostly turned off and it’s completely dark except for a single street lamp near the stairs, somewhere halfway to the terrace at the third floor. In the fade, cascading light from above, stands Marceline.

She sits on the stairs with her legs spread apart and her red boots on, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees, while still keeping her stance empowering. Her head is leaned back and half her face is in the dark, but both her piercing yellow eyes are visible, resting on me. She is smirking and she is completely naked. 

“Marceline!” I exclaim, making the Banana Guards turn around to us, but I tell them it’s all good and to leave us alone, maybe a bit too aggressively. I pace the stairs separating me and Marcy, while not breaking eye contact.

“Public nudity is prohibited!” I let her know, but my nervousness is breaching through my intended reproaching tone. “How did you even pass by the guards?”

“Told them we two have a meeting,” she answers casually, watching me get closer and stop in front of her. She straightens her back, but her legs barely close in. “I don’t think they noticed I was naked.”

“Glob, they’re incompetent,” I whisper to myself, trying to hide my blush by rubbing my temples with a thumb and the middle finger.

She grabs my long dress and examines the material, making a pretty good job at pretending to be interested in it. Just the fact that my calves are exposed in front of her makes my heart beat faster. We both know what this meeting of ours is all about tonight.

“Do you always wear these fancy dresses at Princess meetings?” she asks, letting the dress fall over her hand, which is now resting on the side of my knee.

“We all wear Princess attires,” I say, feeling her hand move up ever so slowly under the dress, cupping my inner thigh. “But I can’t wait to get out of it.”

She smiles at me, her fangs pointy behind the red lipstick, but her hand is curling like a snake around my leg, reaching the back of my thigh. She might not have put too much effort into her outfit, but she surely thought this night through. Her palm presses on my skin and I go up a step to ease her way, but she stops right bellow my buttcheek and grabs my thigh, yanking my hips towards her. She curls her other arm all around my waist and buries her fingers in my hip, and her face in my belly. 

“Mmm, was the seminar any fun?” she asks, breathing in my scent, loudly. I’ve been wearing this dress for the past three days and I wish she wouldn’t do that, but she seems to enjoy my warmth and this makes me push my body closer into her.

“It’s been alright,” I accidently moan answering.

I feel like all my blood is concentrated between her two arms - the one around the waist and the one below my ass. I want her to move her hand underneath my dress some more, but she stands quiet for a while, so I hug her back, holding her head below my chest, feeling the sharp hairs of her sidecut, then the tip of her pointy ear. I bend down and kiss it, loosening the embrace and making her ear flutter.

She lets go of my waist, while her other hand slides back on the inner thigh, but remains high up my leg, just below my underwear. I feel her thumb moving softly on my crotch, tracing the slope between my labia underneath the material. She stops above my clit and I have to break our gaze with a short gasp.

“Did you reach any conclusions during the talks?” Marcy continues making small talk, as if unaware of her hand, her face up to look at mine. I bet she’s delighted at how flustered I am.

She parts her lips just an idea and her eyes drop on my mouth. I can see the two tips of her tongue between her fangs and I bend down to her face, my lips so close to hers I can feel her breathing. 

“Let’s go inside,” I whisper before her tongue can reach my lips, and I stand back up.

Marcy looks pissed I cut off her performance, but also intrigued by my invitation. She makes sure to fully rub her hand across my underwear as she removes it from the folds of my dress. 

She transforms into a bat and follows me up the stair, along the terrace, by the indoor Banana guards, down the hallways and up the spiral stairs to my bedroom. 

I usually like to take some time with my evening routine, but tonight I’m racing through the essentials only, talking with Marcy about what we’ve both missed.. Her touch is still lingering on my skin; I really hope she won’t get out of the mood by the time I shower.

I strip my heavy dress, the short underdress and the panties, crumbling the later in my hands and throwing them into the laundry basket before Marceline can notice how wet they are. I get into the shower and watch her from the foggy glass wall, brushing her teeth with her finger, dressed only in her socks. Somehow, she looks more out of place naked in my personal bathroom, that outside under the streetlight.

I crack the shower door open, the water still flowing down my back. “Aren’t you going to get in?” 

“Do you want me to?” she teases, running her fingers through her hair, brushing it back on her back and away from her chest. 

“You better, after you rubbed your butt all over the stairs,” I find the excuse, and she accepts it, sliding in the damp interior, alongside me. I wish I had a smaller shower.

My cleaning products don’t really suit her, but she doesn’t complain. I finish rinsing my hair, watching her hands wandering over her body. Some parts of her look so squishy and soft - I want to touch them, kiss her, but I can’t find the opportunity to do so without making it awkward. Luckily, Marcy knows how much of a nerd I am and gives me a hand.

“Is my butt still dirty?” she asks, her back turned at me.

She’s holding one of her ass cheeks with a hand, her leg on tiptoes and body halfway turned around, as if to check herself. It’s completely clean, but I run my hands across it, getting closer to that gorgeous athletic back of hers. I can see the hairs on her nape and her long eyelashes from the profile. 

I grab her butt, moving my fingers step by step closer to the interior, until I can feel her vagina with my middle finger and anus with my pinky. I push my chest into her back and my lips on the back of her neck.

She turns the water off and turns her face around some more, lifting my chin with her hand and finding her way to my mouth. We kiss slowly, softly, both our lips still wet. 

I let go of the ass with one hand and move around her waist, down her abdomen and between her legs, as she curls her back and pushes her pelvis into mine, her kissing getting deeper. My index and middle finger slide right between her inner labia, pressing at the opening of her vagina. She shaved a few days ago and the short hairs are prickly against my palm, but her crotch molds perfectly in my cupped hand.

I move it around a bit, not releasing the pressure, and I can hear a muffled moan, buried deep in out kisses, just before she turns around sharply, breaking the position. With an almost hungry look on her face, she slams me against the wet wall.

She grabs my wrists in a single hand and pins them up above my head with an impressive force, while she’s feeling up my boobs and kissing me all over the neck and chest. I feel my knees weakening with pleasure and I’m sure that if I let myself go, she could hold my entire weight in her one hand. 

No one can hear us, so I don’t bother hushing my moans, encouraging her with every breath to go further. I can sense she’s growing impatient, but continues taking her time, savoring my voice, my smell and and my body trembling underneath her touches, pushing itself closer to hers, hot and willing.

We’re almost dry - well, in most areas - when she grabs me from between my legs and slides her tongue back in her mouth to talk, her face close to mine.

“I’m going to fucking devour you,” is the only thing she growls, before her hand reaches between the thighs to my but and she lifts my entire body off the ground and on her forearm, throwing me above her shoulder before I lose balance. I wish she’d have just devoured me right there in the shower, but she flies out the shower and bathroom, holding me tightly, her fingers pressing into my flesh hard enough to leave her prints in.

We fly through the entire royal bedroom in half a second and she only lets me go when we reach the bed, letting me fall on the soft, clean sheets, in the dim moonlight from the windows. I barely stop bouncing on the mattress, that she’s back over my body, kissing and licking my nipples, groping my hips and waist. 

I spread my legs to leave her enough space between them and let my head fall back, as she quickly slides down on me, dragging her tongue along. I push my hips up and let out a loud moan when her mouth is finally low enough.

She grabs my hips with both her hands, as if to not let me escape. Her tongue moves up and down along my inner labia, flat across the vagina and rigid above my hard clit, the tips moving fast around it, her lips completely enclosing the area, trapping it into a sucking void.

She moves her hand from my hip, below my leg and to my vagina, while her mouth doesn’t stop. She presses her index at the entrance, probing its resistance for a moment, then sliding it in, followed by her middle finger. Her thumb finds its way into my asshole and her grab fills me up completely, keeping my pelvis still right where she wants.

I grab the sheets between my fingers and curl my back in, flexing all my muscles, feeling the waves of orgasm getting closer and bigger. Her fingers don’t move inside me, but her mouth is all over my clit, clipping it in between the split, flexible tips of her tongue, slipping easily up and down and around it.

My toes curl up and my teeth grind, transforming my moan into a grunt as I let myself come, feeling all the nerves in my body firing. Marceline stops only when my legs start shaking and my vision gets blurry.

She looks up at me, not an ounce of lipstick left on her lips and waits for my breathing to get back to normal before levitating her body just slightly above mine and gliding up until our noses are touching. 

Her still damp hair is cascading on both sides, down to the bed, thick and rich even with the sidecut. 

I touch myself where her mouth had been, moving my fingers slowly between my folds, then I lift my other hand and I touch hers, which are just as slippery. I feel lightheaded but extatic. She bends her head lower and kisses me, sharing my taste with me. 

“Say, do you mind floating your ass just a bit closer to my mouth?” I whisper, my voice horse.


	7. Sour cherries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mid-air 69

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a bit angsty and I'm not sure where I was going with this one.

Outside is pouring and the sky is so dark, there is no danger in keeping the blinds open. I had moved to a more house-like place, with walls and windows, so PB would feel more comfortable visiting me. It’s lonely and in the in the forest, to reduce the sunlight chances, and the carpet is not always damp, so that feels cozy.

Bonnie is busy above my stove, making pancakes, her back turned at me. She cracked the kitchen window open and it’s chilly inside, the smells of rain mixing with that of pancakes.  
I never really learned how to cook. For once, the post-apocalyptic consequences didn’t allow for many food options. The power was cut off and people would survive on cans and fire roasted pigeons. Simon did his best to give me a balanced diet, but we’d both have died had it not been for my demon side and his crown. Then I became a vampire and never bothered with food again. 

I watch Bonnie pour the dough in the pan, patient and organized. I appreciate these kind of afternoons, when it’s raining and she has some spare time to eat at my place. We haven’t hung out in such a long time; I hope she’ll stay the night. I turn around to see her better, over the back of the couch I’m sitting on, still doing my hair. My fingers are braiding along my scalp, for the sixth and last braid. My sidecut had grown out and my hair is longer than my knees again. 

“How long have we been together?” I check with Bonnie, hoping I haven’t asked that just yesterday or something.

“Almost 150 years now,” she answers promptly, not taking her eyes off her work. 

I sounds so much. Will the next 150 pass by just as fast? Will I start counting my life in centuries, then milenia? When I was a child, each season held such heavy meaning and occupied a specific spot in my memories. But I’ve been with the same girl for 150 years and it’s all blurred together. I focus on the braiding for a while, my arms already sore. 

“Do you think we’ll always be together?” I dare.

“Of course not,” she says matter of factly. 

I pound, but it takes her a good minute of silence to realize why what she said might have hit me the wrong way. She turns to face me in between pancakes.

“Assuming we will live forever, it’s inevitable we’ll grow apart at some point,” she explains logically. “And then we’ll grow back together, and so on. Oscillation is the natural order of things. Give it enough time, and everything goes back and forth.” She turns to flip the pancake, then comes back to the subject. “I find it comforting: familiar change.”

I take in what she said, pondering the future. I rarely give it much thought, but Bonnie has calculated everything that is about to come her way: her hypothetical lifespan, when this planet is going to be uninhabitable, when the universe will die off. And she has some sort of plan for each scenario. 

“You really have an answer for everything, huh?”

“I wish I would,” she answers sincerely. 

I reach the end of my braid and tie it up. I shake my head a bit and my braids follow like whips - it would look very cool when head-banging, I should look into what concerts are around.

“Do you ever miss humans?” Bonnie asks me out of nowhere.

“Not really. I miss conversations, but you can have those with more and more beings in Ooo. Do you?”

“Of course, they fascinate me. They managed to dominate a planet and then just perished. A shame. You don’t even miss that dude you had sex with?”

“No. He fell into radiation goop and had to be killed off to spare his pain.” 

I say it coldly, hoping she’ll drop it. I had one male partner before and she keeps bringing him up. Thank Glob she doesn’t know details about the demon orgies. I kinda miss those, to be fair. I should ask her what she thinks about open relationships, but I should probably wait another couple of decades.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she says, turning the stove off and placing the last pancake in the pile, then coating them in red sugar syrup and dumping a can of sour cherries on the side. “I just figured you must have had meaningful connections to humans, back when they were still common.”

“Yeah, well I had,” I mumble, flying off the couch and to the table, helping with setting it. “But humans are nothing to miss. Nor is dick.”

PB agrees half-heartedly and adds more sugar to her portion. I sink a canine in one of the damp cherries and suck up all the red. 

“Do you want kids?” she continues with the random questions.

“I’m a kid myself, no thank you,” I laugh. “Besides, don’t you have like a hundred thousands children in your kingdom?”

“Oh no, I’m satisfied with mine,” she assures me, mouth full. “I was just wondering about you. You know, I still feel like I don’t fully know you.”

She doesn’t know me? I’ve been singing my heart out with any occasion, whereas she’s compressed all her deeper thoughts in a ball and locked them so coldly, I’m sure she’s not even aware of her issues.  
I shapeshift my mouth into a snout and stuff as much food in as I can, but she goes on with the conversation.

“Can you have biological children?”

“Can you?” I manage to swing the question back at her, more humming than actually pronouncing words.

“I look like a human, but my physiology is fundamentally strange,” she starts her monologue, giving me time to finish chewing. “Maybe I can have offsprings with an unrelated gum person, or maybe I could naturally clone myself when I reach full adulthood, but so far there is no way to find out. And it makes sense too, such a long lived species as myself shouldn't be able to reproduce easily, otherwise overpopulation would become an issue. I’ve read vampires are only fertile for a couple of days every thousand years, but how about your human side, or your demon side?”

It starts lighting, but I don’t stand up to close the window. The vampire fact she knows is true, not that there is any vampires left for me to court.

“My human side, hmm… I kept having periods after I became a vampire, until I burned through all my eggs,” I explain. “And male demons can impregnate literally anything, it’s disgusting.”

Demon sex can also be hella hot, but I fail to mention this. I wonder what Bonnie is about, questioning me like this. Usually she goes into self-convincing nerd mode when something is on her mind. 

“Issues with the Kingdom?” I ask her.

“Just the usual.”

We both focus on the taste in out mouths, silent and thoughtful. I stare at the trees bending in the storm outside my windows. I have an unpleasant idea of a thought just starting to form at the back of my mind, but I ignore it entirely. Instead, I stretch my leg under the table until Bonnie’s chair, and place my foot between her legs, my sole pressing on her crotch. She stiffens in her seat, but continues eating.

“Thanks for cooking,” I play innocent, my toes massaging her.

“Sure, I - ah - I hope you like them.”

I put my fork down and take a sip of the water, moving it around my mouth to clean it, then I push my plate away - I don’t want to be full when I sink my mouth into her. She watches my movements closely, knowing what I want. I just need the slightest confirmation to slam her into the wall. She pushes herself into my foot, not breaking eye contact. We haven’t had sex in a while and right now it seems like an activity we’d both be better at than biology conversions. Would result in a better mood too.

“We should finish eating first,” she points out sternly, though her thighs are tense around my food. “The pancakes are still warm.”

“But Bonnibel,” I say, my voice burning softly along my desire, “I might grow cold before then do.”

I’d rather hear her moan than talk about the logical thing to do next. But despite her advice, she doesn’t take another bite. Instead, she puts her index between her lips and licks the syrup off of it. I let out an impatient breath, that sounds like a quiet purr in the back of my throat. 

I smile persuasively, bearing my fangs I know she finds attractive, letting my tongue slide out between them and all the way down to my neck. Just give me the push, Princess.

She gives in, all at once and all of a sudden, throwing herself over the table with almost rage in her eyes, grabbing my tongue in her fist and snapping my head close to her. 

I growl with pain and excitement, fast to take back my dominance, body jerking into flight and hands in her hair. I fly into her and then to the wall, spilling both glasses of water meanwhile.

She crosses her legs around my hips, skirt up to her waist, kissing me almost violently and trying to rub her pelvis on mine, but barely having the space between me and the wall. I press my body into hers as hard as I can, keeping her head steady with my fist in her hair. Fucking moan, instead of telling me how you like “familiar change”. 

She grabs the belt of my jeans, resling it in the hurry to open it, but I slap her hands away. I grab her better from below her hips and fly to the couch, letting her fall on the cushions, then I take her skirt and shirt off. I strip out of my shirt as well, and I almost rip my bra pulling it off my chest with one hand.

I dive at the couch, landing on her almost naked body and I go on kissing her abruptly, tearing away her bra and underwear. Before I can touch her, she rolls her body over mine with one decisive twist and I ended up underneath her. Is this a battle for leadership? Is she mad she gave into my temptation and is now trying to prove a point about being in control? She’s usually a passive partner, and this turns me on in a rather annoying way.

But I’m still in my jeans and she’s naked, so, above or not, I grab her pussy and lift my head to continue kissing, but she sticks her fingers in my mouth and pushes my jaw back on the couch. She grabs my free hand and pins it down by the writs above my head.

I could close my mouth and bite her bubblegum fingers off, but she’s moving them along my tongue, deep towards the throat and it’s driving me insane - she knows my weak spots. I start salivating and gagging and she backs out from my throat, still grabbing my mandible tightly, her fingers pressing on my tongue.

She lets go of my wrist to open my belt and my jeans, with more precision than the first time, then she pulls them down along my underwear, just enough to have access to my crotch. She takes her hand out of my mouth, dragging strings of saliva behind her movement, which drop wet on my bare chest. I start cleaning it off my boob with one hand, but end up massaging my nipple.

She sticks two of her fingers into me, facing no resistance, and starts pushing them in and out, thrusting her entire body along, as I twirl like a snake underneath her weight, my ankles bound together by my jeans. The wind blows the old window open with a crack louder than my breathing, blasting the rain in, and lifting papers and kitchen towels in the air, but neither of us stop. I clench my thighs around her arm, my muscles contracting in waves and I feel the sweat forming along my spine - but I won’t finish before her.

I start flying, lifting my body off the couch with too much power for her to hold me down, but she curls her arm around my waist and is pulling my hips at her face. I push upwards until I start also lifting her body in the air and she now hangs with both her hands around my hips, pulling me down. I lift my legs up trying to shake her off and take back my dominating role, but this only allows her to slithers her head in the space between my crotch and the jeans. 

A lightning hits close and makes me tense my legs around her cheeks, my head falling backwards with a moan as she starts eating me out. I could escape her trap, but I choose to ride the thought of being unable to do so, until it brings me to a loud orgasm I don’t hold back, my scream covered by thunder. She knows I’ve cum but she doesn’t stop, teasing me further with her tongue, so I pull away in full force.

Free of her mouth but still horny, I fly a little lower, lifting her properly from below her the armpits. She crosses her arms and legs around me, her chin and cheeks slippery with my wetness, planting kisses and bites along my jawline and pulling my braids.

But she doesn’t expect my next step. I shake my jeans off me and hug her tightly, then I fly straight out the window into the pouring rain, both of us fully naked.

“Marcy!” she shrieks in my ear, forgetting the kisses, her hair getting instantly soaked.

Hoping to gain more stability, I let my bat wings grow loose out of my back, sending a familiar ache through my body as my ribs and shoulder blades rearrange. I stretch my wings into the rain, flapping them energetically as we raise above the bending trees, and closer to the wrath of the clouds, Bonnie grabbing on my neck like dear life, only making me more lustful.

Before she manages to comment anything on safety issues, I throw her an inch into the air above me, twisting her body upside down before its fall, leaning back to catch her shoulders on my knees. I stop flying and levitate diagonally, to make sure she’s comfortably not slipping away, her thighs fixed on my shoulders and her ass in my hands.

As the storm unravels around like a symphony of chaos, I spread her butt cheeks and bury my face between them, eating out at her soft skin. I wonder is the villagers in the houses next to the forest are looking out their windows at us, and this only makes me more eager, putting more passion into my work, making sure I don’t miss a spot of the ups and downs between her legs.

Down there, her tongue finds me too, parting my labia rhythmically and trembling on my erection. The raindrops land heavily against our skin and the clouds light up each at its turn, and I can still see the light play when I close my eyes. I let an ecstatic but somewhat frustrated swear out - no way I’m cuming again so easily, I need to focus.

My tongue is penetrating her again and again, bending to explore all the surfaces inside her vagina, taking in the taste, as saliva starts dripping down my chin. I feel her back curling inwards and her grasp getting tighter, and despite the rain, I can make up her loud moaning and gasps, as she’s struggling to not break her rhythm on me. Feeling her climax develop in my arms and on my tongue was the last thing I could bare before I let loose of own orgasm. We clench onto each other and I almost black out, but my floating stays steady. When I open my eyes, I notice the storm has quieted down just a little.

“Marceline, I swear to Glob, if anyone saw and recognized me, I will banish myself out the palace,” I hear her voice from between my legs, but it only makes me laugh.

I turn her around, this time more carefully and not driven by the same desires, though it takes more time and the twist looks less impressive, I imagine. When her face is back at my level, it has various emotions on it.

“This was-”

“Dangerous,” I cut her up.

“Very hot,” she frowns. “But dangerous also.”

I start descending back to my house, just now feeling the cold and the stings of the raindrops. 

“Let’s go take a hot shower and finish those pancakes, I want to eat a hundred,” I let her know.

She nods, holding onto me as I’m looking for a clean spot to land. I really hope she’ll stay the night. If only to shake away the tiny fear, that we’ve started oscillating away from each other.


	8. Cut

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short, break-up chapter :(

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you still like it! I'll jump back to them being together soon, I just want to include all of their history, as close to canon as I can imagine :)

“Could you please stop bitching?!” she snaps, her contour hazy in the bright backstage lights, framing the mirror that only reflects me.

“Watch your fucking language, Marceline!” I snap back, aware of the irony, but when she gives me a “really?” look, I keep my stance. 

I stand straight and rigid, and I cross my arms, but she doesn’t stop pacing around, preparing herself for the concert. Everything in this room makes me feel like I’m dissociating. I wish we’d have this conversation in a place with less stale anxiety and vanity in the aer, concentrated after years stars have used this room.

“I never swore at you, it’s different,” I say. “You’re anger is concentrated towards my personality.”

“It’s concentrated at your behaviour right now,” she points out. “Look, I’m stressed for this thing tonight, can we just drop it?”

To be fair, I have forgotten at which point in this argument the actual fight began. It started about something serious, then transformed into nit-picking, and then turned into a full, but silly fight, which brought out some serious underlines to the silliness. 

“No, communicating is good,” I insist. “We must solve it now, or I won’t be able to focus on your music.”

She stops applying the yellow eyeliner and twists her head 180° to snap at me further, though this time she does so without implying I’m a bitch.

“How is it still you who needs focus, when I’m the one performing and you’re the one nagging?! How many times have you shoved me away because you had to do science, because you needed to ‘focus’? Glob, Bonnibel, maybe you’re just shit at focusing.”

“Are you kidding me? How is carrying for an entire civilization and playing some songs even comparable?”

I know I touched a sensitive chord, but she continues applying her makeup. Somehow, her lack of words or flinch unsettles me more gravelly. 

“I don’t mean your music is not important.”

“No, I get it,” she snarls, putting some dark lipstick on. “You’re a genius and you’re right and I’m too dumb to follow your spotless logic.”

“Must you be so dramatic? Get out of your victim complex, dude, I never considered you dumb.”

But she’s like possessed by this calm coldness, and if she was willing to just end the conversation altogether a moment ago, now she seems to not care about her concert at all. She came floating and landed right in front of me, soundless like a ballerina.

“But I am a victim, Bonnie,” she makes clear. 

“You make yourself to be one.”

“Did I make the war happen?”

“It’s been hundreds of years, just let it go!” I can’t stand it anymore. “When will you take responsibility for your actions? You chose to be immortal,” I also make it clear.

Her eyes show all sort of shades of hate and anger, but all under a sudden layer of hurt. I feel tears forming at the corner of my eyes as the next words form on the back of my tongue.

“I dropped into this bare world alone and made it come alive,” I choke. “You had a family and you had strength, but spent your time feeling sorry for yourself.”

Ah, I remember. The argument started because I said the two of us are different. But my stubbornness to win the fight is fading away, overcome by a sadness that settles in in waves, just to eventually break into heavy tears. They fall from the surface of my eyes and to the corners of my mouth, but Marceline is not wiping them away, nor is she crying herself. She stares me down with the same ice-cold rage, only sensible in her lack of breathing and the clenching of her jaw.

“I was eighteen when I slayed the first vampire,” she spits. “Immortality had barely crossed my mind when I sucked his soul. I didn’t know. Because Simon couldn’t educate me about it and my father did not.”

I open my mouth but she continues, voice as sharp as her pupils and teeth, slow but unshaken.

“It is cruel to hold me accountable for this, or for everything that happened to Simon, or for all the death and destruction I could never take away my eyes from. I have learnt to refuse to feel guilt over these.”

There is a specific hoarseness at the end of her sentence, but her face doesn’t seem aware that her voice is earning to break into cry. Her eyes seem dryer than ever. I want to apologize for starting this, for all the wrong things I have ever said to her, which now pile up along my memories over the past decades.

“You were right, we are different,” she goes on. “Different in origin and in end, and different in the way we are misunderstood. Now I wish to be left alone.”

I swallow, tempted to look aways from her gaze.

“Maybe we both need some space to grow,” I manage to whisper, tears draining me of any courage, dragging my look at my feet. The lights are blinding me.

She finally breaths out, in a short sigh.

“Why couldn’t you just answer yes, all those years ago,” she says, vulnerability disguised in her soft blaming. “When I asked you if we’d always be together, you could just have said yes. It is up to us, where and how we fit in each-other's hearts.”

“You knew it too,” I say, blinking back to my odd reflection. 

“Yeah,” she admits, peacefully. “The feeling grew heavier and heavier, and I guess today it crushed us, huh?”

After we break up, I get out from the backstage room and try to make my way through the people who came to see her. A lot of them recognise me, but the tears have dried up on my face and not even my blush is distinguishable in the night of the graveyard, where the concert is taking place. 

I drag my feet across the place until a nice hill and stop for a few minutes, in the soft breeze. I hear her getting on stage far behind me, but above the cheering of the ghosts, I don’t hear familiar tunes. She’s singing something else than planned.

“~When you were here before,” her amplified voices cries through the valleys. “Couldn't look you in the eye...~”

Ah, she’s singing Creep, by Radiohead. Of course she would. I’m pissed at her continued self-deprecation, but the music delights me, flowing like honey and melting my thoughts. I turn around slowly, afraid to fully face her, wondering if she’s watching me.

But her eyes are closed, and her hair is gone. She must have shaved it off right before going on stage, and now her glorious mane, that used to engulf her like a fog, has shrunk down to the contour of a shadow on her scalp. She’s singing painfully and gorgeously, her face tensing with each syllable and there is something primal in her passion, as if she’s vomiting the lyrics.

“~But I’m a creep~,” she rawrs in defeat, too strongly for the audio equipment, “~I’m a weirdo~”

Before her song comes to an end, I turn around and leave through the bare trees, contorted like seizuring hands. I leave the concert behind me, but the reverberation of her bass lingers on my soles and in my chest.


	9. Mother's Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marcy gets high and (self)-destructive: all sorts of trigger warnigns, but not explicit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry it took me so long! I've been working on original fiction and uni stuff! Just two more exams and a thesis to write, and I'm ready to be unemployed hahah

The dampness gets colder as I’m flying down the pit, and dim light from above gets scarcer. The Snake Mother lives deep into the insides of the Nightosphere, at the end of her well. 

I hope I have the right address. The entire neighborhood was full of identical holes into the ground, all silent and black, but all sheltering who knows what lurking creatures. I’ve lived in the Nightosphere many times, and yet I haven’t discovered all its horrors. The Snake Mother is a local drug lord, and while I’ve tried most of her market, I never met her personally. But I built up resistance over the years after the breakup, and I’m in the search for her most potent substance.

The most potent that will not destroy me without repair, that is. I have indeed been in search of ways to numb my feelings or fake them, but my coping mechanism is not that self-hating that I would actually kill myself. I do want to recover in the future: to get clean and resurface full of life and wisdom, then to start living fresh and healthy, with a new perspective and a new passion. But first, I want to hit rock bottom.

My feet touch the surface of water, so I fly back up a bit. It’s pitch darkness around me, with the round pit entrance small like a coin above. The echo of the shallow waves is eerie and the walls ice cold.

“Hello?” I try, politely. I move my ears around, trying to pick up any sound: a few soft click noises, eventually followed by a worded reply.

“Do you require light?” the voice asks, in a soft whisper, as if breathing out too much air when pronouncing the words. 

“Yes, a bit would be nice, if it’s not a problem.”

You have to be nice to drug lords.

Without a sound, a single blue light appears to my right, then crawls up the person’s finger: a luminescent worm, too pale to be of much help for normal eyes, but for my vision it suffices. 

The creature holding the worm doesn’t look much like a Mother. Her shoulders are wide and break into multiple arms, her chest bare and boney. Instead of eyes, she has long nostrils, and the rest of the face is taken by her mouth, cut wide to the ears. Her long hair flows over the sides of her face, smoothly and black like the water on the walls, but I can see the needle-like fangs through her cheeks.

“Are you indeed his offspring?” she wants to know, tongue long and sharp at the end.

Of course my contact would tell her who my father is. I doubt she’d even have agreed to see me in person otherwise. Ugh, that’s the most annoying part about being back in the Nightosphere. I confirm and she moves the finger holding the worm closer to the wall, revealing a narrow entrance into what I assume it’s her home. I float carefully after her, squeezing in. We shortly reach a bigger cavity, empty and moist like I imagine all her chambers to be.

“Undress and lay down,” she gestures to the ground.

I take off my pants and shirt and fold them, then I sit down crossing my legs. I know how the procedure should go and I’m pretending I’ve done that before.

“Do you need someone to keep you alive while you’re out?” the Mother asks, her many legs bending in odd ways, stepping on the floor and walls around.

“No, I don’t survive on food or oxygen.”

The amount I paid for is supposed to keep me high for 13 years, many of which I will spend unconscious. But there’s something about my answer Mother doesn’t like or understand, because her nostrils shrink and her head tilts in silence.

“I thought even half humans need food,” she whispers curiously, inviting me to tell her more about my genetic inheritance, but I refuse to engage.   
She climbs up the wall, taking the light worm with her and stops on the ceiling of the cave, right above me. Her hair gets tangled in her fangs when she speaks.

“Are you ready now?”

I nod and lay down on my back. The surface is cold and sticky bellow me and the sight unnerving above. Her face winces with pain, as she starts birthing the snake. I close my eyes, but I can imagine too clearly where the wet noises come from.

“Remember,” she hisses. “Let it crawl over your skin, but it must not bite you. So don’t move suddenly.”

I nod ever so slightly, and try to get comfortable.

I hear a plop as the snake falls from her onto the ground, landing somewhere to my right. I open my eyes, but the light is off and in the pitch darkness I can only hear it slither slowly. There isn’t much space around, so soon I can feel its cold smooth skin against my leg, then it crawls up to my belly, in search for heat.

I don’t feel high at all, until I feel it all at once.

I am in and out in the following years, oscillating in a bizarre game of excitation and numbness. I see and feel many things, and while not all of them are strange, I’m never sure whether they’re real. I find comfort in this and I let each flow use my body as it pleases. There are the low days, which pass blank and black like a coma, with no proof of me existing during them other that my hair growth. 

Then there’s the vivid hallucinations my mind rides like a carousel while my body is frozen in place. They often include ecstatic feelings which bring me higher than orgasms, but soon after the body paralysis follow the cramps and spasms. 

The nausea reminds me of the radiation sickness I experienced as a child and I hear myself calling for my mother. After a while I catch glimpses of myself walking or flying, often in search of something but never remembering what. 

Once the pain passes, I get a couple of days of relative awareness, when I burn the sheets stained in my fluids and play my guitar. Sometimes I wake up wandering the streets, sometimes singing on a stage, but most often I’m in my apartment. Each time I have to dig up all of my memories, only to have them dragged to the bottom of my mind by the next wave of delirium. And the mold in the corner of my bathroom is bigger every time, extending like an ink stain on my ceiling. 

I watch it yet again, shivering in the bathtub, my nails clawed up so deep into my shoulders that the tip of my fingers are surrounded by flesh. I take them out carefully, but the wounds don’t heal immediately. My blood is pouring, and my legs are shaking. I’ve pulled down the shower curtains, not sure if this time around or a couple of years ago. The bathtub edge is cracked with the shape of my hand grabbing onto it. I gather my knees to my chest tightly and let my face sink between them, arms hanging limp, resting palms up next to my hips. The last clarity periods have been wider, and I hope this one is here to stay because I don’t think I have the energy to go through this much longer.

My shoulders are done healing in a couple of hours, but I stay in the bathtub longer, breathing in slowly and crying absently. There’s a longing lingering in chest: for my garden back at the trailer, for a new song, for recovery, and even for Ooo and Bonnie, but really anywhere and anyone that’s not here and now. But I can’t go back. I can’t open portals and my dad surely won’t help me out after I ran away the last time. When he heard I returned, and he saw my shaved head, he laughed his ass off and knew immediately I broke up with “the gum”. I thought she’d come back for me again. I haven’t told her I’m coming here, but I’m ashamed to admit that I expected her to be spying on me worryingly.

The air pressure drops – the only thing changing here periodically, which most things formed their sleeping routine after. It must be “night time”, and I’m still in the bathroom. The air is heavy with smells of mold, blood, sweat and drool, and my skin is sticky under all these layers. With a sudden crack, the damaged part of the bathtub splits further, and a big chunk of the tub crumbles to the ground. The sound of marble and ceramic crashing, for whatever reason, is the last straw. 

From the bottom of my heart, all my sad feelings combust with the raw frustration into an almost furious determination. I spring up on my feet and turn on the water, scrubbing at my skin with the motivation of somebody getting their lives together by showering. I’m a gross, greedy masochist, wallowing for help like a land washed whale, except I swam here by myself and I’m not even trapped. Nobody else is going to offer me the type of peace that I can achieve myself. I literally have eternity to figure myself out, and I was going to resign with the type of person I am right now? But screw eternity, I’ll turn everything around in one day.

I spend the next hours cleaning the apartment, which is an easy task despite my body feeling weak, for two reasons. First, I can’t really destroy it too hard while incapacitated, and I don’t eat or drink, so there’s no spoiled food or vomit/shit to deal with. Second, people in the Nythosphere throw their trash out the window, so I pick up whatever garbage or broken object I find and yeet it, including the entire bathtub. 

Pulling the tub out of the floor feels like taking out a weed and it does for a good workout to remind my muscles of what they’re capable of. I close all the remaining pipes that stick out of the concrete and swipe the floor. Now, before the days get drowsier and I fall back into the first stage of my intoxication, I need to figure out a way to get the hell out of here. I could beg or trick my father, but I probably have a better chance at begging or tricking some other local businessman.

My shoulders are sore and I have a pulsating headache. I should wait and collect my strength a bit – fighting demons is more demanding than unrooting a bathtub. I am also starving, and I already washed all my blood away. I rummage through the house after any red object, but I’ve sucked them all grey already. I’m looking under the kitchen table when the doorbell rings and makes me bang my head trying to stand up.

Some folk know where I live but they virtually never come see me. I decide to ignore it, but it rings again. Something in the pattern of the sound reminds me of a very specific impatience. This person has visited me before, many times. But it can’t be, not here. I rush to the door so fast that my body slams into it when I stick my eye on the visor. It is Simon. I open the door and pull him inside, slamming the door behind us just as fast.

“It’s not safe for you here! Do you even know where you are?”

He seems merrily confused as always. He’s got his crown, a wacky remote control and a bag of cranberries.

“Why yes, some people here are very impolite, but Gunter made a lot of friends,” he grins, offering me the cranberries.

I grab the bowl and start sucking on them, still pouting at the situation, unsure whether I like it or not.

“Simon - slurp - how did you get here? Is that- is that Bonnie’s portal remote control?”

He hides the remote under his gawn frowning.

“I know how this goes: I give you the remote, you fly back to Ooo, move out to a new address, and then it takes me ages to spot you again.” He flies around the room avoiding me. I get tired fast but he continues spinning in the air by himself. “I came here to hang!!” he tells me, upset.

“Alright, good! Ugh, just stop flopping your beard!” I rub by eyes. “Fine, let’s hang.”

“Really?” he says excited, landing on my living room floor. “Wanna play some songs? When Gunder is done with his friends, we can all play D&D! Or we can watch a movie! Is that thing there a TV or a window?”

I chuckle lightly and caress his shoulder, too briefly for it to mean anything to him.

“We can watch a movie, I think both of our brains right now can handle Nythosphere level of plot complexity. Do you want anything to drink? I only have tap water.”

I get myself a glass, to help with the head-ache, if only via placebo. Down in the backyard of my apartment, Gunter is jumping rope with some demons.

“Hey Simon, is anybody... supervising the portal you opened?” I wonder.

He could have stolen the remote but no way he figured out the entire procedure.

“Of course there is, these portals don’t open by themselves you know.”

“Did you… kidnap this person?”

“What are you talking about, I never kidnap anyone.”

“Well who is it? Who’s helping you?”

“Hmm, tiny and like a zebra, expect red not black, and in circles not lines.”

I sigh shortly. It’s not her, but at least Peppermint Butler knows what he’s doing. I grab the only cushion left on my couch and fluff it up for Simon to sit on, while I find a comfy position to float in.

“Hand me the remote, will you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t have no remote, I came here to hang out.” 

“For the TV, silly.”

I find an extra cranberry and stick it in my fang, then I lean back, glad that placebo is working.

“We’re watching movies.”


End file.
